The Federal Government is officially back open for business. After more than two weeks of dealing with a partial shutdown and a looming debt default, we can all breathe a sigh of relief and refocus on the mission.

As a provider of key geospatial, cloud and mobile solutions to the Government, we experienced the same challenges as our Government customers over the past couple of weeks. However, unlike our Government customers as well as many of our fellow industry partners/competitors, Thermopylae has the ability to focus on our ever-growing stable of commercial customers in times like these.

While Government employee furloughs and business setbacks for the contractor community were top-of-mind, the shutdown actually reinforced the true value of Government to citizens overall, which is a bit of a silver lining. It also further demonstrated how important national security is to the safety of our country.

Early on, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said that the shutdown “seriously damages” our national security and gives foreign governments a field day to recruit U.S. Intelligence employees.

Now that we are back on track with a funded Government, it is time to ensure our energy is being used to meet the national security mission. We can be certain that, while our Government was stuck in a gridlock of partisan fighting, our adversaries were putting an extra focus on exploiting our temporary weaknesses.

Our nation continually confronts global issues and challenges – it does not pause because of an unfunded U.S. Government. We look forward to continually creating new innovations that allow our Government to keep our nation secure, support the warfighter and enhance overall humanitarian efforts into 2014 and beyond.